Just before the end of last year I managed to land myself a new job, and the building I work in has turned out to absolutely fascinating historically. I work for the Bridewell Theatre, which is just one part of a big Victorian building, the St. Bride Foundation. Indeed I'm at work just now waiting for a show in the theatre to finish. This is a piece I was recently asked to write emphasising the Foundations links to the printing industry, so no space even to mention the Bridewell Palace and Prison which were also on this site once:
Bride Lane as Dickens would have known it
“It is for the purpose of keeping printers up to date that this St. Bride Foundation Institute is chiefly formed.” wrote one “J.G.” with Victorian precision in his 1895 essay, PRINTING CLASSES, AN ADDRESS TO ALL CONCERNED. Just a few months earlier at the grand opening of the Foundation’s smart, fresh new building on Bride Lane the band of the 3rd London Rifle Volunteers had serenaded the festive crowds and VIP’s with THE BLUE DANUBE.
Architects drawing of the proposed building
However it was another less azure (and more invisible) river which lent its name to the nearby Street to which the Foundation owed its existence and its location, the Fleet. When Wynkyn de Worde established his printing press near St. Bride’s church and the River around 1500, he stole an advantage over his former master William Caxton who had set up Britain’s first ever press near the seat of government in Westminster. It was to the literate merchants, clerks and clergy in and around the ancient City of London to whom power and wealth was rapidly devolving, which sparked an insatiable hunger for news, information, entertainment and novelty, all of which was fed by the lucrative trade of locally produced mass printed texts and images .
“Fleet Street” quickly became synonymous with newspapers and by the 1880’s the City was dominated by just one industry, printing. In 1890 William Blades died. He was a major figure in the business, biographer of Caxton and collector of unique technical print related material. Coincidentally a board of Governors, many working in or revolving around the world of print were busy establishing a new charitable Foundation in the City, St. Bride’s.
Bride Lane and the Foundation from Fleet Street c. 1900
The Foundation’s core targets were to prepare new workers for the printing industry both in mind, through formal training and study in a purpose built school and library, and in body through a gymnasium and the City’s first swimming pool. Blade’s peerless legacy was bought by the Foundation intact as the nucleus of its teaching resources. Over the subsequent 115 years this has grown into the vast, fascinating, Borgesian labyrinth forming the Foundation’s current archive of books, journals, photographs, engravings, drawings, manuscripts, printing presses, type sets, wood blocks and miscellany; a collection of International importance.
Past/present, pool to theatre
The Foundation, once fondly called “the University of Fleet Street” continues though its various wildly popular education, entertainment and conference programmes to promote all aspects of printing. It is a survivor of the Blitz, a living newspaper, its archive a
kunstkabinett; in which the word resides, presides, is stored, nurtured, preserved, deconstructed and studied. Wordsmiths Shakespeare, Pepys, Ben Franklin, Lamb, Richardson, Johnson and (of course) Boswell all walked our location’s EC4Y Lane, as did the young Dickens who used to drink in the Cogers Hall at 15 Bride Lane accross the road from us. More recently (and tangibly) Harold Pinter and the Peters Ackroyd and Blake (who has designed his own wonderful ALPHABET) have visited. Blades and Caxton are memorialized in their own rooms in the Foundation and a portrait of Richardson adds to the splendor of the Salisbury room.
The Salisbury Room
If the Library and its collections are the Foundation’s brain, the Bridewell Theatre is it’s voice, with on average ten shows a weeks staged in what was once the swimming pool. Words read privately are declaimed publicly through works from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, Wilde to Sondheim, together with brand new texts specially commissioned for our vibrant building.
Pinter in the Bridewell Theatre
As James Mosley wrote in his 1978 article TYPOGRAPHIC TREASURES AT ST. BRIDE’S, just as the stampede by the press to abandon the City for the Isle of Dogs was about to commence - “it seems appropriate that there should still be an institution in the traditional heart of the printing and publishing trades where all aspects of its cultural and technical achievements may be studied.” The Foundation he concluded “may be said to have fulfilled the hopes of its founders”. The St. Bride Foundation is arguably
the psychogeographers delight in the City.
Newspaper design conference in the Bridewell Hall